Shadows of Doubt

An alternate universe corpo city filled with generated crimes to solve. You get a case board, scan for fingerprints/footprints, talk to witnesses, look up sales records, check out cctv cameras among loads of other stuff. All of it is happening live in the city - everyone has schedules, an apartment, a workplace, an inventory, an email account, a blood type, a shoe size… - so that murder/kidnapping/robbery literally happened in the game while you were crawling through vents looking for an envelope with sensitive documents that someone asked you to steal. Just yesterday I got to a crime scene super quickly and caught a murderer leaving the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on their person. There are deus ex style body augmentations too.

One of my favourite cases was a woman who got murdered. I had the husband pegged for it but couldn’t pin it on him. His fingerprints were all over the place and he was on the cctv but they lived together so that wasn’t really evidence. The case went cold. A couple of days later the HUSBAND is murdered and I’m stumped. Just go looking for anything related to the guy and hope I stumble across something useful by accident. So eventually I break into the husband’s boss’ apartment and find a bouquet of flowers with a note for the boss from the husband. It turns out the husband is having a secret gay affair with his boss. The boss kills the wife so he can be with the husband. Husband doesn’t want to be with a murderer I guess so the boss kills him too!

It’s occasionally a little buggy still. I was supposed to follow someone, take a photo of a briefcase handoff, follow the recipient and get the briefcase back and have done this type of case before. Yesterday though the handoff never happened and I waited with the original owner for a few in game hours. My guess is the recipient is dead or was someone I knocked out earlier while I was solving another case and I messed up their schedule.

No jesus was not a fuck baby, Mary probably was. Immaculate conception is not the same as virgin conception. Immaculate means God did not curse her for the sins of Adam and Eve (which God had previously done with everyone else), which is usually called “original sin”

Truly it’s a hard game even if there were no cylons. Humans rarely win in my games. Alas, it’s out of print 😭. Its spiritual successor Unfathomable seems good as well, though I’ve only played it once

Then you discover the board game and it’s a whole new level of great

I have a colleague who is trying hard to do it, but it isn’t good enough yet fortunately. I point out as many issues as I can to deter him but it ain’t working.

With the way multiverses are so in right now, more likely he’ll reappear as Hawk from Titans

In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.

Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud?

Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you’re talking about. I don’t have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).

I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn’t meet the criteria of the system. That’s all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.

sadness-sadness would be depression.

Wait I thought the implication in the first film was that depression was when your emotion console thing stops working and you can’t feel properly at all. Granted it’s years since I seen it

All makes perfect sense, thanks for explaining!

Can someone explain why this bill prevents IVF? So OK it says that the embryo in the petri dish or whatever is a human. Is the point that therefore other various laws apply to it and so it can’t be implanted? Or is it other parts of the process are now forbidden like the freezing others have mentioned?

I use DuoCards for flash cards. The word games are FOCLACH (basically wordle in Irish), litreach (guess words from people saying them in 3 Irish dialects) and seafóid (basically Waffle in Irish). The games are all browser based apps so not in app stores, but DuoCards is.

ETA while DuoCards has built in flash cards, I usually make my own based on the words I learn from all the other sources, and get the translation and grammar details from teanglann.ie, tearma.ie, or nualeargais.ie

My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.

Relevant clip from Hot Fuzz

Some version of the phrase has been around for a couple years at least

In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.

Yeah unfortunately not taking a buy out often means one of the Big Five making their own version of whatever you’re doing / buying out your competitor, and then bullying you out of the market. A bleak possibility for start ups

There is an addendum to his plan that might have made it make sense. If he had said something like “I’m giving the universe the chance to make better decisions”, suddenly having half as many people means (probably a little more than) half resource consumption, half the carbon emission, and more time to figure out and implement solutions to these problems. I’m not sure how the housing crisis would pan out, I expect it would get worse. It also makes more sense that he destroys the stones after “I gave the universe its chance, now the ball is in its court”.

This also solves the doubling resource problem. His motives are to pressure people to change their ways. Giving them more stuff might cut hunger, but you’ll just have that hunger again in 50 years and we’d probably increase carbon output to boot, and destroy more environment to get these doubled resources.

I don’t know enough about the stones to say whether “infinite resources” or whatever cheat code would have worked, but they certainly could have dropped a line that it wasn’t possible, or that it would cause more problems than it solved (how does chemistry even work in this universe? If nothing ever gets used in reactions then the chemistry that makes our bodies work is borked)

But anyway, as the Russos did not put this line in, the premise was flawed

Whatever is being done, it isn’t enough. Lots of countries are lying about their carbon emissions and it’s basically the worst it’s ever been. Quick intro video